For many years, attempts have been made to produce apparatus that would successfully break apart rails or metal bars and in particular railroad track rails. Such rails have a particular cross-section, generally referred to in the industry as a standard rail section, comprised of a head or ball area, a flanged bottom, and an interconnecting web with each of those portions being integrally formed.
Rails that have been taken up from old rail beds need to be broken into small segments to make them more conveniently reprocessable as scrap iron and many attempts at this have been suggested. It would be most desirable if a way could be found to allow this rail breaking operation to proceed in a continuous and automatic manner, and in as simple a manner as possible so that processing can continue in an uninterrupted manner, without operational failures and simply to reduce maintenance and the chance of mechanical failures.
The closest patent that the applicant is aware of is Crawley, U.S. Pat. No. 4,346,828, which deals with a railroad rail fragmenting apparatus and method.
Rails can be placed on loading tables with the tables being raised from a horizontal position to a raised, inclined position which causes the rails to slide toward a conveyor system at the bottom of the inclined table. The rails are transferred one at a time by being rolled over an abutment which allow many rails to initially come to rest on the conveyor in something other than an upright condition. Those that are tipped over are returned to an upright position, resting on the bottom flange, by a hook system so that the rails wind up on the conveyors in an upright fashion. The rail is then conveyed toward a notching station where chisel members, in the form of triangularly shaped heads on the end of a cylinder drive rod, are forceably inserted laterally against each base flange of the rail. This will form notches on each side of the bottom flange. After notching, the rail is fed between a pair of rotating guide members, in the form of pneumatic tires, which feed the notched rail into a breaking station. The notched area of the rail is initially clamped against a fixed wall so that the pair of notches is positioned just beyond the end of that fixed wall which will function as the breaking edge. The portion of the rail which extends beyond that fixed wall will be broken off by a plunger and cylinder which actuates a ram horizontally against the flange of the rail section. The breaking force is applied adjacent the free end of the rail section to be broken and is thus spaced down stream from the fixed breaking edge. It is indicated that fragmentation of the segment of the rail being broken will occur when that extended portion has been bent sufficiently to cause a fracture to develop at the pair of opposite notches which will then extend up and across the remaining portions of the rail section. Clean breaks and continuous operation are not believed to be produceable with Crawley's apparatus. Notching is not always precise, feeding must precisely coordinate with notching locations, rails may not always arrive in upright conditions and there is no suggestion of how to automate the processing operation.
Schrader, U.S. Pat. No. 1,682,633, discloses a manual rail breaker that also indicates that prior to breaking the rail, both opposite sides of the rail are weakened, such as with a chisel or sledge, with breaking thereafter occurring at that weakened position.
Britten, U.S. Pat. No. 303,699, passes rails between a pair of nicking cutters so that the rail is nicked along both sides at four separate places on the web, two adjacent the head, and two adjacent the flange. The flange is then rigidly heldin a slot and the head and web are broken from the flange, then the web is restrained and the head broken therefrom. Breaking is affected by a reciprocating ram adjacent the points where the web had been nicked.
A number of patents disclose the concept of applying force to a rail from one side and resisting that breaking force at two spaced apart locations on the opposite side with breakage of the rail occurring at the point where force is applied from one side. Patents representative of this concept include Heavens et al, U.S. Pat. No. 272,249, Ward et al, U.S. Pat. No. 623,853, Miller et al, U.S. Pat. No. 1,477,582, and Saito et al, U.S. Pat. No. 3,515,326.
Additionally, Glover, U.S. Pat. No. 1,284,312, discloses apparatus for shearing a plurality of metal bars by the joint action of a knife and anvil. Glover indicates that prior to the bars being broken, they are prepared in the usual manner by nicking or scoring with an oxyacetylene torch and then by chilling. Finally, Klempner, U.S. Pat. No. 3,567,089, relates to apparatus for breaking apart engine blocks and uses a ram which comes in contact with one side of an engine block which is supported on the opposite side by two spaced apart supports.